#right now ai is just monkeys on typewriters

[eli-the-bastard]

Until AI becomes ACTUALLY sentient, it really has no place in anything that stems from passion.

As someone who very much relates to robots and "meant to be human" programs, I have relatively strong opinions about how AI development should be approached. Treating them as something that has a singular purpose of something for humans to consume doesn't make intelligence. It's just a soulless machine.

Actually that no punctuation plot hole ooc wattpad fanfic written by that 12 year old will ALWAYS be better than character ai. And I love that 12 year old btw

[jeremy-ken-anderson]

Playing with AI Writers

For the moment, let's set aside the question of whether the writing is stolen. In theory if you write prolifically yourself and/or it grabs exclusively from public domain, which is a LOT of text, a language model could get something that behaves much the same as the current stuff, even if the current stuff may have shitty moral undertones if its creators did a copyright violation because they're lazy.

In other words, from a structural standpoint, that's not the problem. "Ethically sourced" AI chatbots are possible.

I want to talk about the results, things I appreciate, and the current endemic problems.

So, most of the time the way a chatbot works is by slicing pieces of speech patterns into what it calls "tokens." These are usually a sentence long, but not always. It then finds sets of tokens that seem like the next piece of what should be said, like a longer-form version of how your autocomplete works on your phone. You press "t" and it offers the most likely options, probably "the" and "this" unless you have odd writing habits (more on that in a sec) and then if you follow up with u for "tu" it updates, tuned to the extra information; "the" and "this" are now impossible, and the most likely words starting with "tu" are "turn" and "Tuesday." With tokens all sliced up and vaguely grouped in a way we'll say is kind of like letters for the sake of letting this metaphor make sense, you can see how putting in a sentence - "I attempt to pick the ogre's pocket without waking it." - is much like putting "t" into an autofill-enabled device on a phone or word processor. Adding another sentence might get you closer to your preferred response, being as it is, in this metaphor, akin to typing "tu" rather than "t"; You're feeding in two tokens to help it respond with superior search results. For example if you follow up with "My arm grows weak as I near the creature and smell the flesh that I realize used to be my squad." that is a very different - more fantasy-horror - vibe, and both the odds of the creature waking and the results of its waking will be substantially altered by such a follow-up.

Now, in spite of how much I've enjoyed playing with AI storytelling devices on my own machine, I'm gonna trash these programs for a hot minute: The unsolvable problem is that context matters. People are treating AI-generated text like some magical context-maker machine, the way people who've had 1 but not 2 years of physics might think if they get their ring of magnets at just the right angle they'll get another ring of magnets inside them to spin infinitely for unlimited free energy. This metaphor is, I should mention, very good.

Because just like the fake infinite energy machine, there are a bunch of people trying to profit off of the idea that AI is infinite context-value for no work.

Because just like the fake infinite energy machine, it's not like there's no such thing as an engine; just not an engine that makes infinite power for free. The problem with AI writing isn't that it can't get you toward having a written document full of interesting and potentially even copyrightable text. It's merely that it has a bunch of hidden costs that make it way less efficient and valuable than the pitch men are claiming.

Let's talk Voice. AI doesn't have a writer's voice, because it's literally taking individual sentences from 800 writers at a time. And it can't get voice. You don't sound more like Sir Terry Pratchett by making Death TALK IN ALL CAPS. You sound more like Sir Terry Pratchett by making Death honestly as merciless as real Death and yet a compassionate and even relatable character. There's no combination of tokens, short of recombining the tokens into the original texts they were taken from, thousand monkeys on typewriters style, that results in doing that.

I do want to give props to the mimicry for a second, though. If you start a conversation with Bob-bot as Roger, and you want the story to go a certain way, you can keep feeding in tokens to improve results, right? And there's a fairly natural way to do this: By writing an extra sentence after your own response. I shake my head and grip at my hair like I want to pull it out. "Sure, that sounds like a great idea. Why don't we eat the children while we're at it?" Bob-bot can tell I'm being sarcastic, and while he isn't sure of why he can tell that I'm royally pissed off at his suggestion.

Not only does that last line of extra "here's what my interlocutor knows" prompting help a lot with getting the conversation to avoid some of AI writing's natural pitfalls, but after 10-20 exchanges, I noticed that Bob-bot started copying my formatting. [What Bob-bot does] "What Bob-bot says!" [What Bob-bot intends, or how Bob-bot's action affects Roger emotionally]

I actually found that really cool! But. But!

Let's talk rerolls.

This kind of thing is more immediately visible in AI Art; Discussions of how "prompt writers" who fancy themselves AI Artists are simply unable to fix "their" work, because the problem with an AI-generated picture is usually that it has bad fundamentals on proportions, has like six light sources (because different pieces of the picture are copied from different works), and most of all because the current generative programs are bad at segmenting their resulting images by physical zone. Once they make something with sixteen pirates behind Superman, they don't remember where in the picture there are sixteen pirates, so if they put that in without you ever asking for any pirates (let alone sixteen) they don't know how to take pirates out of the picture, where some dude you hired off of Fiverr would just go, "Oops, yeah I included a layer from a different picture because I'm working on six commissions at once, let me delete that rq" and it'd be fixed. With the AI you're better off just running the program again, asking for a new (equally flawed but for different and hopefully less egregious reasons) picture of Superman.

But the same thing happens in the AI writing. I had a character named Ari and apparently a lot of other people had male characters named Ari, because the chatbot constantly misgendered her even though I established in the character bio that she's a girly, womanly, female, feminine DAAAAME. I also had a female goblin at one point, and the misgendering on that one I understand a bit better (though I found it deeply annoying) because the proportions of written genders of goblins are WAY less close to parity than the proportions of written genders of humans or elves. If you think of all goblins in all fiction this thing would be pulling from, it's gotta be like 90% or more that "goblin = male" right? Makes me wonder how often it'd misgender dwarves.

Further props to the program: Much like how my mom's phone at first would attempt to correct "lesbian" to "Lebanese" but soon learned that no, mom really did intend to write the word "lesbian," local-memory caching does start to fix this problem as it goes. You can edit the AI's response so that "As Ari rounds the bend, his breath catches at the scene before him" -> "As Ari rounds the bend, her breath catches at the scene before her" and each time you do that the misgendering gets less likely for future replies within the same story.

...But this is where we get into that bit, before, about the hidden costs. Between its inability to generate a consistent tone, its complete inability to carry a story without you providing multiple pages of background and worldbuilding design docs, and the editorial work you'll have to do cleaning up its replies and/or writing stage direction into your replies and/or flat-out rejecting something that feels completely tonally unacceptable or just plain ignores the situation AI: "I stab the ogres with my +9 ogre-slaying knife!" Me: "You're not THERE! You're at the CLUB!" there comes a point where you have to compare the value of how much work you put into this engine in order to get an output you're happy with not against infinite time, but rather...against the mighty story-generation engine known as A Page of Blank Paper.

I've found that for all but the most intentionally-rambly forms of writing, the latter has a lower time cost, fewer bad detours, and easier repair work between starting the production and getting to something I'm really happy with.

AI Text Generation is really impressive, and the things it does that impress will likely continue to get more impressive, but until it fundamentally changes how it seeks out its results, those impressive things won't solve the fact that it's inferior to simply writing well. And if you're not good at writing well, I have my doubts that you'll even catch the fact that there are sixteen pirates behind your Superman and your outputs are gonna be shit but you won't realize it. (Which I guess is an endorsement for AI Text Generation as a choose-your-own-adventure toy, if you're bad at writing?)

[justinforprez]

Oh so you’re an evil capitalist, imperialist wage theif?

As a good communist I hate work and people having to work. Automation eliminating work is good right?

Jokes aside, if we ignore that current AI art “creations” are just theft and we consider if its just good or bad I would say that it is good. Even if its just for speeding up the draft process for a story or making weird stuff. If you used to have to pay to commission art now you don’t have to. On the one hand those artists will no longer be paid but they shouldn’t be such greedy capitalists. now the means of production are in the hand of the people instead of elite ivory tower rich kids that could afford to make art because of their family wealth.

Why is art work? Why must you work hard for it to be art? If tomorrow you found out that the mona lisa was easily painted in like an hour is it still art? Does a shitty, mass produced artwork that took days to paint still count as art? It was hard work.

I think AI art is shit. I think AI writing is shit. But if it gets better, thats good. We should be wary however because it will probably get very stale. So they change the algorithm and that becomes boring and they make iterations of iterations and eventually all art is categorized and individual creation is meaningless because the AI monkeys on AI typewriters have made every meaninful combination of worlds Of course thats likely to happen over a thousand years or more.

art is work. If you didn't put in hard work it's not art. If you didn't bleed then you're taking shortcuts. you have to put in "effort" or your art is worthless. if you don't have a work ethic then you're worthy of derision. if you are unwilling or unable to suffer then you are unworthy of making art

this is so, so obviously a conservative, reactionary sentiment. This is what my fucking dad says about Picasso. "They just want to push the button" is word-for-word what people used to say about electronic music - not "real" instruments, no talent involved, no skill, worthless. how does this not disturb more people? this should disturb you! is everyone just seeing posts criticizing AI and slamming reblog without reading too close, or do people actually agree with this?

usual disclaimer: this is not a "pro-ai" stance. this is a "think about what values you actually have" stance. there are many more coherent ways to criticize it

[his-tamine]

No bc as somebody who *has* used c.ai in the past, you make a good point. I never saw it as the same or similar, because with generating ai art, the copying was always very blatant, if that makes sense? Like you could see hints of other people's styles or even other works you'd seen in them, plain as day.

whereas with ai generated writing, it felt more like monkey with a typewriter. but you're absolutely right, it's still that same type of ai that "learns" by eating up actual human writing, and regurgitating it in a different form. Writing is also very much a form of art, and so ai-generated writing should be classified as ai-generated art.

needless to say, sorry to all the people who wanted a tutorial on how to make your favorite chatbots snz, I'm gonna drop c.ai altogether by this point. Never used it for ideas, prompts, or anything like that, but just for small-talk and inducing, but now the thought that the words coming out of this robot used to be someone else's, definitely changes the way I see it. ALL artists should stand together against ai.

Ty for your perspective, homie :)

Okey Dokey, so no more tiptoeing around the issue, with many people's helpful private opinions, I've come to the conclusion it does need to be addressed.

AI "art." From here on out, anyone I see posting it is getting blocked. I'm not arguing with anyone about this, that's not what I'm here for, but I've seen it too much as of late, and I feel I should at least say something about it, especially as an artist myself. There's never an excuse for it.

- Need a visual/reference of what your oc(s) would look like, but don't think highly of your own artistic abilities? Surprise! There are still plenty of ways to obtain one, without using AI. The amount of incredibly talented artists in this community, some of whom are in need of commissions. The incredibly talented artists who sometimes draw for free, out of hobby or perhaps need for practice. And then even if neither of those work for you, try some of the character customization mediums we've all used before, that have existed on the internet for years now. (Think Gacha, Picrew, etc. Even if it's seen as "cringe" by some people, it's better than this.) Or hey, try drawing it yourself. "Bad" art is allowed, and everyone starts somewhere. Even if you don't like how what you're drawing looks at first, you will eventually if you keep trying, I promise you. Watch speedpaints, animatics, cartoons, study the way things look through your human eyes, and apply them to your process. Learn. Grow.

- Ignorance? There is no way that you've dipped your toes in AI generated images, without knowing what needs to occur for an AI to generate said images. It does not come from thin air. These robots use real people's faces to produce images of people, real animals to produce images of animals. So, in the case of "art," that's right, they're using a real artist's artwork to produce it. In short, stealing. If you've not heard about this by now, and have still been using AI generators to generate "art," then I'd have to assume you've been doing it blindfolded.

- Just for fun - or worse - for fet? ...Let's be serious. As I've explained above, there's no reason to be using it at all, but especially here on fucking SNZBLR of all places! Like... Guys, this is a sneezing kink/fetish community. And you're really knowingly using a robot - which grotesquely melds together other people's work - to generate fetish content? Do we... not realize how gross that is?

I'm not coming after anyone specifically, because I've seen more than just one person doing this, but if the shoe fits, wear it. And that's all I'm saying about this. I'm really tired of seeing it, so if those of you doing it won't change, I will. Though considering the blatant disregard some of you have for human artists, one blocking you shouldn't bother you too much, right? ♥

Anyways, sorry if I freaked anyone out with my cryptic ass posts from before, I was hesitant to say anything, because I didn't wanna start shit, but sometimes it's just not worth it to bite your tongue. If the snzblr art community can (rightfully) come down on tracers, then we should be doing the same with AI "art."